Bringing Dreams and Nightmares to Life.

Did you know that in Mana, maternity leave is extremely generous? No? You didn’t ask for this priceless piece of information? Well, I just wanted to let you know that the maternity leave for Mana school teachers is really, and I do mean, REALLY, fucking good. 

This is a parody of one of the many strange and nonsensical goings on in Chronexia and the Eight Seals by Mathieu Brunelle. I must stress that he is not a hockey player but some weeb from Canada that got big on the Anitube scene back in the day. He in his infinite wisdom decided to write not just a book (of which will be the topic of this article) but also a very short-lived anime of the same name. This is supposed to be the first in a trilogy, but I have found only two out of the three and only one of them is an eBook and in English. I am not learning French nor am I risking a loss of product involved in international shipping. (Edit: Turns out that while the trilogy was supposed to be a thing, the French version is just the first book but in French, I don’t know why it has a different (and worse) cover but that was something discovered after the fact). 

I must confess that all these factors are compounded by the fact that I simply cannot be asked to read more of his stuff. Not after watching the anime, not after reading this accursed tome. 

I have read several terrible books throughout my short life, Empress Theresa, Fifty Shades of Gray, Atlas Shrugged. Cows. But this (Chronexia) is on the lowest rungs of literary hell. 

Say what you will about Fifty Shades, but at least it’s amusing with several quotable lines. 

This one is a horrifying product of failure on all ends. A level of amateurism not seen outside of My Immortal. But unlike My Immortal, which you could enjoy in the comfort of your own home without spending a dime, Chronexia costs you 18.51 Pounds, for a soft cover, otherwise you are paying 8 pounds for it. 

I wish I was joking. 

This is also what the English cover looks like

And this is how the French cover looks. 

Don’t ask me how the covers got worse. 

And before you ask, no, there is not the faintest possibility that this was a troll post. My Immortal has that likelihood, but Chronexia is very sincere and very serious. 

Well, I guess we need to dive in and try to ask the question, why is Chronexia?
 

Tom and Misty are very boring protagonists, Tom is devoted to the point it’s creepy. He lives and breathes Misty; he worships the ground she walks on. He repeatedly and wilfully wants to die for her. 

If he weren’t the protagonist, he would be the villain in a stalker movie. But he is constantly rewarded for his manic melodramatic behaviour with no consequences. It’s never endearing or cute, just unsettling in the unspoken ways people wholly inexperienced in love would try to depict it. 

Misty herself is a boring Miss Goody Two Shoes who is so pure and innocent that I half expected her to rise into the heavens on a pair of silver wings. Despite the repeated desire to become a god, she is unwilling to hurt anything or do anything aside from the bare minimum to achieve her goal. 

Imagine wanting to become the fantasy equivalent of a politician and somehow not be willing to put in your all for the win. You just let your friends do all the killing, how lazy can you be? 

I would like to say that this shows how Misty is willing to manipulate her friends and loved ones to get her way. That it shows how she is a master manipulator. 

No, all her friends willingly fight for her, and she never has to persuade any of them to fight against their best interests. They just help her, putting their own safety and lives at risk while she never lifts a finger. 

It makes everyone look like a bunch of idiots (which they are). Tom’s motivation is entirely to serve Misty, who in turn has the charisma of a dead animal and the chemistry of a stone in clear water. 

When you have protagonists that are as one note and bland as Tom and Misty, protagonists that have all the romantic tension of two cold sausages, the read isn’t particularly engaging. And when you must read over four hundred pages worth of repetitive dialogue and bland, tensionless interactions, you start going mad. 

To help showcase this, there is one scene where the inevitable misunderstanding happens, Tom thinks that Misty doesn’t love him anymore because of the goddess's possession. He and Misty don’t fucking communicate and have a big sulk about it. While I am grateful to Mathieu Brunelle for not stretching the dumb meaningless conflict into a whole third act. That doesn’t excuse the lazy attempt at tension, that gets resolved paragraphs after it’s introduced and is utterly mechanical. 

Tom and Misty exist solely because Brunelle knows that protagonists must be good, they must be nice and innocent. When you are in love with someone, you go above and beyond for them. But he doesn’t understand the nuance of human behaviour. 

It reads like someone who’s perspective on human relationships and interactions have been made through the likes of anime. And not even good anime but bad romance anime, where the tension is wrung out for every drop of drama until the romance is dead as roadkill. 

I think because of this, the romance never changes, never meaningfully alters in relation to age, experience and power dynamics. Misty never becomes more controlling as she becomes a time goddess. Tom never loses his fanatic desire to protect the woman he loves, even as she can manipulate time. As if that can compare to mere swords. 

Everyone is static, never changing or evolving. As a result, the romance, the characters, the world feels stiff and empty, trapped in a time vortex devoid of change. 

What I am saying is that Chronexiais an extremely tedious read. As invigorating as a pond of stagnant water. 

I don’t know what sort of anime Brunelle watches but it clearly isn’t the good ones. Based on the writing, I would guess that it is the bland and intellectually empty anime that infests the Isekai genre. 

More of this hypothesis will be revealed as this article progresses. But for this part, I will say that the shit anime influence with Tom and Misty (asides from their names), lies with the story’s instance that they remain blandly likeable and sympathetic. Both have their tragic backstories complete with absent/abusive parents and school bullies. All standard fantasy protagonist backstory bullshit. 

It feels like Brunelle can only work with archetypes rather than characters. While having an archetype is a good foundation for the type of character you are building, you still need to make them stand out as characters amidst the slop. 

Unfortunately, Chronexia is the blandest and most sour of slop that resides within the dead space of human imagination. Indeed, Tom and Misty are symptomatic of the problem indicative to Chronexia’s writing, and that is the total absence of anything creative or imaginative. 

There is no story that someone wanted to tell because they wanted to explore something about the human condition or even provide a moment of entertainment. It is just a product, lazily designed to be consumed and enjoyed like so many bland wish fulfilments. 

There is nothing to be said about the nature of relationships. Nothing to examine about power dynamics or the loss of friendship. Just dead spectacle and hollow characterisation. 

Like so much bland slop, it is designed to be consumed, Chronexia is designed to be consumed and forgotten about as soon as it is done. 

It stands against everything I believe art should be, and yes, even escapist art. At least there, we ideally escape to learn important lessons that we can apply to the real world. All that is left with Chronexia is packing peanuts. 

Despite Mana being a whole different world with their own rules of reality. Brunelle somehow, for some reason, has decided to include Greek Gods within his universe. While this already throws open the doors to a whole host of problems, it is more indicative of Brunelle’s laziness as a creative person. 

To accommodate for the fact that literal Greek deities exist within your high fantasy world, you must consider how history played out, the cultures that spawned them and the issues that would come with their inclusion. How different would the Greeks be in this world in comparison to ours? How might the Greek deities be in relation to Brunelle’s magnificent contributions to the western fantasy tradition? 

Alas, Brunelle simply doesn’t care. That is too much work for him, so, much like Bright, he just throws them into his brave new world without a single thought in his little head. 

Say what you will about Dante, but he treated Greek myths with more dignity and grace then Brunelle ever could. 

Gone is Zeus’ thunderous (pun intended) personality, no longer is he the serial cheater and lover of women, never will he torment women with sexual assault via bull or swan. 

He shoots lightning. 

That’s it. 

Gia also appears and is about as interesting as a wet sheet of printer paper. I can’t even remember what she does, she is that boring. 

Brunelle, much like everything else in the book, approaches intertextuality with all the respect and artistic joy of a depressed Czech insurance clerk at the day job. There is no interest in exploring the figures that he is lifting, but instead just dumps them in there. 

All the care of a toddler smearing shit on the walls. Hell, I have seen some toddlers that expressed more creativity than Brunelle during such a session. 

I wanted to further explore this failure at creativity by how our heroes use these beings of power. 

They capture the essence of the gods and then release them during battles. 

Basically, Brunelle turns the Greek gods into glorified Pokémon. No personality, just an extra summon that you can call upon when you are fighting. 

Imagine being so uncreative, that you can’t be bothered to make your Pokémon stand in this bland and empty. 

I can’t even imagine what that must feel like, to experience or to be involved with someone so creatively bankrupt. 

This problem bleeds back into the major flaws of the text, its un-creativity and inability to explore or expand on the ideas built on it before. 

I doubt that Brunelle has read any ancient Greek myth or anything that wasn’t made for horny teenage boys. He only knows the broad abstracts of Greek myth, but ultimately nothing else. He might have watched Disney’s Hercules. But even that loose interpretation of the mythology is better than the nothing we got here. 

The fact that he turns them into Pokémon, and that these gods manifest in the Japanese coded setting, all of which adds to the strange and haphazard nature of the world building. There is no reason for Greek Gods to exist within Mana, but there is even less of a reason for them to exist in a Japanese setting. 

I am curious as to why Brunelle didn’t use Shinto Gods for his setting. Did he forget that there is a religion, or is it because he most likely didn’t study the culture he purports to love? 

I suspect it is the latter, as his ideas and interpretations of Japanese culture are as shallow and pandering as the anime, I suspect he watches. 

The Greek God Pokémon exists because Brunelle only has the shallowest and most broad overview of culture possible. It’s no wonder he reduces such powerful beings to animals you throw out to fight at a moment’s notice. 

He only knows Pokémon, but he has never read Ovid or Homer. 

Why would he? It doesn’t come from Japan.
 

Brunelle is an Anituber, part of the online community that loves all things anime and Japan. Well, mostly anime’s version of Japan, which can be at best inaccurate to real life and at worst completely wrong and bastardised. 

That isn’t to say that anime is bad, or that you shouldn’t watch it. You should just go into most of it not expecting an accurate depiction of Japan. There will always be some cultural patterns to the medium, like the ambivalence towards slavery, the hyperfocus on underage girls (that are always sexualised) and the absolute demand for escapism above everything else. 

I could go into the problems anime has as a medium regarding audience expectations and the profit motivation against the importance of art and culture. But that is for another article entirely. 

What I want to stress is that anime fans tend to not expect in-depth stories or intellectually stimulating ones. This is made explicit during the book; it is the most intellectually dead story I have read. I have seen more themes in goosebumps books! 

This is a problem linked to the fact that Brunelle has consumed a lot of anime but due to the lack of intellectual content he doesn’t have anything to say. 

Because Brunelle doesn’t care about saying anything, indeed is completely disinterested in exploring anything of worth. The book feels completely empty and vacuous, things happen, events occur, and characters react. 

But there is nothing going on there. 

I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare, I wasn’t even expecting Watership Down, but I do expect there to be something to be there in my media. Even if it is something as simple as achieving godhood might be bad. 

We can’t even have the tried and tested method of teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God. At least there is an iconoclastic desire to destroy old unjust social systems and a rebellion against institutional tyranny. 

There isn’t that in Chronexia, instead it’s just the dead air, devoid of meaning or curiosity. Brunelle isn’t curious about the world, he doesn’t find anything interesting about the culture he claims to love, that he believes he loves. 

Instead, we get an extremely bland and flat reading of culture, with all the originality of rancid butter. 

Now, what on earth does this have to do with his depiction of Japan? 

Well, his fantasy world has a Japanese coded setting, and shall we see how well that goes?

The women in the Japanese coded world are written in the most boring way possible. They all wear kimonos, are meek and subservient to their husbands and are always involved in healing. They are also fully versed in martial arts and are also ninjas.

It’s also vital to know that they also have massive, massive tits. Indeed, unlike the European coded women, who are not as sexualised if at all, the Japanese coded women are treated as squeaky sex doll curiosities. 

I would say that it’s a depiction of orientalism, but it isn’t that deep. He is just copying the anime he has seen, women, often underage girls are often hypersexualised to the point of absurdity, with massive boobs that should cause terrible back pain in a sane world. 

It also doesn’t help that at a certain point in the narrative, during the tournament chapter, where a pervert strategically destroys the Japanese coded girls’ clothes. It’s a comedy scene. We are supposed to laugh at the hilarious sexual harassment. 

All this makes sense if you consider the type of anime that contains the shallow, hypersexual depictions of girls and women. There is nothing more to the sexual elements then just cheap cringe titillation. 

The Japanese coded world lacks any interesting inspirations, no Shintoism, no Japanese mythology, no nothing. It’s as empty and vacuous as everything else in the story. There is no real love for Japanese culture, just the shallow dead husk of pretend culture that often infects the anime space, where escapism reigns over everything else. 

You don’t watch certain types of anime to think or feel anything outside the warm comfort of not having to think about your shitty life for a moment. 

When weebs claim that they love Japan, they don’t mean actual Japan, they mean the version of Japan they see in anime, which is flawed at best. 

Chroneixasuffers from the problem that reveals how much of a nothing burger his writing is. He is not good enough to write something compelling, but he is uninterested in learning. 

Chronexia is about failed mimicry, where he rips tied tropes of anime and presents it without any changes or deconstruction. 

He doesn’t know how to do it. 

I also would like to mention how often he informs us that the Japanese coded girls he sexualises are of age. He constantly mentions how the girl that he puts into sexual situations, is in fact of age. 

I would love to make fun of this, but I do believe that it is self-evident already that he doesn’t want to get into trouble with sexualising minors. 

Which is a big problem with anime. 

I do want to bring attention to another weird choice that reveals more than it might seem. 

So, there is a character called Ryu within the story, one of the male characters in the Japanese setting that can summon Greek Gods for some reason. 

Now, to the average westerner, this might seem like a nothing burger, after all there have been characters called Ryu, iconic ones like Ryu from Street Fighter and Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden. 

Hell, there are some South Korean people named Ryu. 

But the key concepts here are either campy larger than life people or a different culture. Korean Ryu might seem similar on paper but has a completely different meaning and proper spelling, Ryu in the Korean context is referred to as Yoo, and as a surname. 

Not a first name for a Japanese setting. 

This is because Ryu in the Japanese context translates to Dragon. 

While having dragon as a first name is fine for larger-than-life protagonists in video games. It isn’t really for a serious fantasy novel set in Japan. 

Naming your child Dragon would be like naming your western child Unicorn or Daenerys. 

It isn’t working out well for the child, and you are going to have to spend a lot of money on therapy bills to make up for all the bullying they are going to suffer at society at large, if they don’t become the Joker first. 

Having a serious (I have heard rumours) story set in a mediaeval Japan where a character is called Ryu suggests a complete lack of understanding regarding Japanese names.

Or culture in general. 

Brunelle’s understanding of Japan is primarily informed by video games and anime. 

But he doesn’t take any of the good lessons from either medium. 

He only knows the basics of all literature. 

He only knows the shallowest aspects of all media. 

I would like to give one tiny positive element to this long ass screed. That is the main villain, Vince. 

Vince is a whole barrel of fun; he carries with him a flourish and flamboyance that would match the average Disney villain. In a world that takes itself too seriously, Vince’s larger than life everything is a joy to behold. 

I do want to clarify that when I say Disney villain, I do mean like low rent Disney villains. The fabulousness of Vince is purely by accident, judged by the virtue of the fact that the whole ass book is completely stupid and a failure. 

Vince is a discount Disney villain whose inclusion in the narrative is on the level of bad akin to The Room. His strange behaviour and queer coding are thoroughly enjoyable despite all the problems that come about due to it being in Chronexia. 

These factors would include but are not limited to: 

Vince’s weak motivation 

Vince’s pointless role within the story proper, existing to fulfil some tragic backstory elements. 

His death halfway through makes him forgettable 

Generally forgettable motivation despite being gay as pie. 

Vince is one lone spark in an otherwise dead world, twinkling with some force despite all the odds. He is a lone example of something entertaining against the dull as dishwater novel he is trapped in. 

If Chronexia wasn’t so painfully bland and boring, smothered under a thick layer of incompetence, Vince could have been a delightfully campy villain in a very silly story about a bunch of kids trying to kill God or something. 

But unfortunately, we don’t get that. 

I want to leave this chapter with a quote, I hope to show some of the campy joy that Vince displayed. 

What a waste of a character. 

“If you keep on falling, at some point you won’t stand back up!” said Vince. “You can’t stand up forever Tom.”

Any fantasy epic needs some sweet worldbuilding. Whole worlds will be made over the course of a text, where the reader gets lost in a strange and wonderful world that will feel like home. 

There is none of that in Chronexia. 

If you haven’t caught on to one of the major problems within the text dear readers, then I will need to spell it out now. 

It’s the complete absence of creativity within the text. 

Brunelle’s worldview, as established previously, is informed almost solely by the anime and video games he has consumed. 

He doesn’t have any other forms of media consumption, let alone any close reading or media analysis. 

As a result, the world that Tom and Misty occupy is as hollow as a dead tree in a pond. 

The world itself is called Mana, you know, the substance/energy that is stereotypically used to cast magic spells. Forget Middle Earth, Arrakis or even Arkham city. You have the land of Mana! 

We also have the Fire Ruins, the Ice Catacombs, Earth Temple and can we not forget about such startling examples of creativity such as Sphere of Life (it’s a ball that grants life) and Darkness Sanctuary (it’s a place where darkness is kept locked up)! 

The worldbuilding reads like a lame RPG where all the artistry and creative drive died in a freak yachting accident. 

Hell, most video games nowadays have more creativity than they did during, say the 90s arcade era. 

It shows, again, a complete lack of creativity. Everything is named with all the cultural impact of brutalist architecture. 

And this isn’t the only example of dead creativity. When Brunelle isn’t ripping off Greek gods without any sort of approach to such larger-than-life characters, he is making his own. 

You won’t believe the names of these extremely original, extremely well-developed characters that will stand up against the Greek gods? 

Are you sure you are ready to hear?

The fire god is called Pyro, the water god is called Hydro, and the time god is called Chronos. 

I might have gotten a bit unreasonably angry when I first read these names. I didn’t know how I was supposed to respond, given that I have already seen the sterling expression of creativity in the location names. 

Maybe it was just the intense level of laziness in the world building that made me break? Or perhaps it was just the complete inability to name his gods anything interesting. 

Perhaps it was just the absence of anything of substance or depth. 

I wish I could talk more about worldbuilding. But I am already fearful that I am going to get repetitive. 

Chronexia is an empty world, populated with icons and ideas stitched together with the most barebones of culture and creativity. 

I wish I could remember more about the world. But there isn’t anything worth remembering. 

Chronexia is a dead world. Created by a god that knows nothing about the arts. 

He can’t even do a good adaptation of anime or video games.
 

One of the joys of being a self-published indie writer is the editing process, you can never truly get rid of all the little typos if you rush things, otherwise you must deal with the humiliation of taking down and updating the document, living with the shame of bad reviews forever. 

I am lucky in this regard, I am not well known so I am able to quietly take down and upload my stories multiple times, much to my own embarrassment. It is one of the most unglamorous moments of my short career and I don’t feel any pride in it. 

I learnt an important lesson that day, take your damn time when you write and edit your damn documents in good time. 

Also enlist readers, and editors. Better safe than sorry. 

I understand this factor of the creative process is compounded by the translation, if English is your second language, you are going to have problems with the translation, sometimes you will make mistakes. 

Now, with that out of the way, I can say with confidence that Brunelle didn’t do any proof reading or line editing before throwing this accursed thing out into the world. 

Throughout we are bombarded with strange and bizarre writings that defy explanation. Kindly look at these quotes:

““What's this,” panicked Tom.

“I drew the cards! It was my destiny we saw, not yours!”

“You're so dumb,” insulted her Gab. “You did it on purpose.”

Asuka kept on crying.” 

The prose is stilted and amateur, with strange dialogue tags that fail to convey emotion. Sometimes there are just some strange uses of the English language such as the following: “Chronexia was the first one to stammer something. “How horrible!” she swore. “That’s super gore.”” 

I don’t understand what super gore is, I would love to have someone explain what super gore is. And no this doesn’t make any more sense in context. 

Brunelle struggles with the concept of the English language, which could be a quirk of the translation. I would even be forgiving of the flaws due to this; I think it shouldn’t have been published in the state that it’s in. His prose is as broken as a crashed plane and as much as a joy to read. But I could forgive it. 

That is until I discovered one of the strangest examples of a failed acronym. Please see the following example. 

“He had finally found it,  the emotion flowing in his veins, the one

making his soul pulse. What pushed him to save Misty,  what made him fulfill

the promise he made her,  he made himself. Tom finally discovered what the

gray aura meant. He had a Fae of Will!”

And to show the acronym: 

“Fae means Feeling producing Assessable Energy,” 

He can’t even get the basic acronym right. How does one fail at such a basic feat of the English language? Someone that can’t be bothered to properly translate or write something of quality. 

The flat vacant prose is painfully boring to read and struggles to engage, this coupled with the terrible characters and non-existent worldbuilding make a truly tedious read. Chronexia reads like the first draft done by a rank amateur. Except instead of beta reading it, you must pay eight pounds for the thing and it’s the final product.
 

So, the price tag, how does one expect someone to fork out 18 pounds for something of this quality. I know that most professional authors (something that Brunelle most certainly isn’t) tend to charge way less than that for full-fledged novels. 

The price tag showcases a deep sense of ego for the product. A complete lack of self-awareness from a creative that believes he has made an excellent product that will stand out against the rest of the slosh. 

The problem is that he is wrong on so many levels. It also shows a complete lack of understanding in the market, if you want to compete, you need to price what you believe your product is worth and how much your competitors are charging. Charging 8 pounds for an eBook of such quality would be laughed out of the room. He hasn’t consulted any fellow fantasy authors or if he has, he hasn’t listened to them. 

I guess you could argue that because Chronexia is such a bad title, that people will be willing to pick it up out of morbid curiosity. You can gauge that something is wrong just from the blurb, which reads like a first draft: 

“Days were pretty average for Tom Watson, a seventeen year old swordsman in training. Along with his best friend Misty and his aunt Noemi, he bored himself to death. That's why Tom has wanted to travel the world once he'll be done with school. Unfortunately his travel begins a bit more abruptly than he originally planned it, when an enemy from the past makes its return.

It's now up to Tom, Misty, Noemi and their traveling companions to put a stop to this madness. Hopefully Misty's new ability will help them along the way.

A compelling novel that juggles action, adventure, plot-twists and cliffhangers masterfully. A story that's been tightly twine, and where the smallest details can create tremendous impacts.”-Blurb

You might be able to see what I am getting at here. Everything about and surrounding this book is slapdash and haphazard. The price tag is not designed to make something competitive, but to get as much money out of a consumer base that doesn't really care about quality, or want to read because of peer pressure, or because they want to make fun of it. 

Like me. You decide which scenario I am referring to. 

The price tag is just one of the baffling decisions that make Chronexia so fascinating, a glimpse into the audacity of the author’s belief that he can charge something as high as 8 pounds for something so questionable of quality. 

The absence of any self-awareness truly is pervasive inside and outside the text.
 

Did you know that there is an anime adaptation of Chronexia of the same name? Could this have been a chance to learn from the feedback? Make an anime of the thing that would have worked better in an audio-visual medium? 

Well, it has a yikes rating of 1.9 out of ten (based on the admittedly low number of 26 users). And it looks like this

Yeah, it’s as bad as the book it’s based on, primarily because literally nothing has changed between mediums. All with the amount of care and artist respect you would expect from something as good as Chronexia. 

Brunelle’s inability to change or innovate from his mistakes can only be due to his own ego. He doesn’t see the flaws in his work of art, why should the anime be any different? 

This is the core problem of which all the other failures of Chronexia are borne. The inability to learn, or change, to grow. 

The feeling that you don’t need to change, that you are perfectly fine as you are. 

It’s honestly tragic, and fatal for the creative. You must be able to keep your ego under control if you want to succeed as an artist, everyone starts from the bottom, some get to the top faster than others. But those who are unable to, will stagnant, and get made fun of by weirdos online.
 

Chronexia is one such example of the self-published author stereotype, the one that isn’t interested in exploring new ideas, isn’t talented or skilled in any way and has an inflated sense of their worth. This sort of person believes their trash is worth eighteen pounds. 

While I do abhor this stereotype that only the untalented and rejected self-publish, unfortunately it holds a kernel of truth. Brunelle is not the only example of a self-published author that can’t write, that expects exuberant prices and ignores criticism. 

But Brunelle is only one such example, a lower-case example, as we are more familiar with the likes of My Immortal or Empress Theresa in the west. But he is still there, he is one of the unfortunate pitfalls that come with lowering the barriers to entry for writers. You tend to get a lot of brown slop. 

So, why is Chronexia? Why is it so bad? Chronexia is one of the many examples for the failure of artistic pride. The inability to see or embrace the faults of their style and learn from them. Hubris and ignorance in the craft they attempt to ape badly. Why isChronexia? The author's ego.